apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

is there a way to save a copy of all those emails to a folder on your desktop? I've wondered this for my Gmail account. I was able to do it to my dad's aol email account since he saves his bill statements.

I used to bad at reading emails... but now I fanatically deal with them immediately so that my inbox is ALWAYS "0".

Things that changed my email life:
1. I got rid of all the folders I created myself. I now keep all emails I receive (and don't delete) in my "inbox". This enables me to sort and look through ALL my mail by date/person/subject etc and then delete them in a group. When you have your mail sorted in different folders, this is not easy to do. So, for instance if I think I'm probably not going to miss any mail I receive from AT, I delete it all in one go, or anything sent prior to 2007, I delete it all in one go! And gee it feels good.

2. Once you've read an email, if you don't think you will need to read it again, delete it immediately. I'd say 90% of my emails are of this type. If you're not sure, just keep it - you can afford to be generous with yourself here, it's just electronic. If you think you might one day need to know where that expensive translucent speaker came from - by all means KEEP THAT EMAIL.

3. Any email you have to deal with or reply to and don't want to forget, mark it as "unread" until you deal with it... or transfer it to a "task" or "to do" list somewhere.

4. Even if you are diligent about deleting emails you'll never read again... you'll find, as I have, that heaps slip through the net. I sort my emails by "sender", and delete in batches once every 6 months or so.

5. If you have thousands of emails to look through, I suggest sorting by sender, and looking/deleting/reading 500 at a time until they are all done. It's not impossible... and it will make you feel good.

6. Unsubscribe to lists you have good intentions of reading but never actually do.

7. Don't feel obliged to follow a link someone has sent you if you don't have time. If you think say, an article looks interesting, ask your friend to summarise it for you.

8. Don't read everything that's sent to you if you don't want to. It's your life and you don't have to read every joke, plea for help, interesting fact, gossip, sale news, spam... if you don't wanna!!!

Sorry, didn't mean to rant... this may be obvious... i just thought I'd share (perhaps overshare?)

Sorting by sender, grabbing the clumps from folks you need to keep, moving those to a new folder, deleting the rest, backup, backup, backup. Tedious, but effective.

Or you could just have a random hiccup on your office computer which deletes your entire inbox, which is what happened to me. I've only had to send one email saying "Hey, I lost the doc you sent, please re-send."

If only I had the cojones to just do it myself once every six months or so.

I have set myself up a little schedule:

1. All day I disposition emails quickly into a follow-up folder or a "to-be-archived folder". I only do this when my complete focus isn't needed elsewhere. If I have higher priority tasks to complete I don't disposition emails.
2. Every morning, I disposition emails that did not get dealt with the day before. (Inbox Zero by 9:30 every morning!) I also weed out my follow-up folder for anything that is not relevant, or completed and then set my priorities for the day.
3. Once a week, archive the "to-be-archived" folder to remote storage
4. Once a year, replace the previous year's archive folder with a new one. That way I can look up emails by year if necessary.
5. Delete archives older than two years.

Overkill?